23-year-old Harlem-bred rapper A$AP Rocky first made his mark on both musical and pop culture with his well-received Live.Love.A$AP mixtape. The supposed 3-million-dollar advance from Polo Grounds Music was a testament to his hard work and originality. Recently, Interview Magazine had a chance to sit down with the emcee to talk about a bevy of topics. Below is an excerpt of the article while the entire piece can be seen here.

A$AP Rocky’s ferociously energetic mix tape Live.Love.A$AP quickly caught fire with hip-hop heads, music bloggers, and nominal tastemakers when he unleashed it on the world via the Internet last fall. In fact, the furor was so great that large numbers of those most standoffish of record-industry gatekeepers—A&R people—soon found themselves frothed up and in a tizzy over the 23-year-old Harlem-bred rapper’s peculiar blend of influences, which include Southern regional hip-hop styles (like the slowed-down, doped-out beats of the Houston subgenre of screw music) and the world of high fashion (who was the last rapper to name-check Rick Owens?).